


I'll Give Up Everything To Find You

by devilswreckedchewtoy (AmberFyre)



Series: In The End I Feel Alive [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU of an AU, Crossroads Deals & Demons, Hell, M/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, RP verse fic, Season 09 AU, Spiraling into insanity, as in this fic takes place in hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 06:58:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16057892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmberFyre/pseuds/devilswreckedchewtoy
Summary: Taken to hell and left with nothing to occupy his thoughts, Sam finds himself reliving those last moments with Ben. He'd always been better at tormenting himself than anyone else who had tried. This time, he finally finds the edge of no return.





	I'll Give Up Everything To Find You

**Author's Note:**

> Written for wolfofthe141-archive for an RP verse. This was an AU of an AU that took a dark turn. Unbeta'd so any mistakes are my own. As per usual, I own nothing but the story. Originally posted on tumblr.

He hadn’t really given much thought to what would happen after.  Hadn’t let himself bother to consider it.  After everything he’d been through, everything he’d survived (even when he hadn’t wanted to) he didn’t really think it could get worse.  He’d lived through untold years in the Cage caught between two archangels who had no love for him and nothing else to amuse themselves with.  He’d lived through the madness that had come with those memories being let loose to flood his mind after being brought back.  He’d made it through the trials and an angelic stowaway.  And he’d held Ben in his arms as he’d breathed his last.

Sam didn’t really think there was much left he couldn’t endure.

He’d been wrong.

He expected pain.  Torture.  He knew what happened to souls in Hell.

Or, he thought he did.

He didn’t really count on Crowley.

Still rattled, shell-shocked, and surging with emotions and regrets and things left unsaid and _the look in Ben’s eyes_ blinding him to almost everything, he thought he was ready for anything, thought he couldn’t possibly hurt worse.  Thought that as long as he could hold to the knowledge that Ben was alive ( _and he’d left him alone, dear God he’d left him alone; but what could he do because Ben was only dead because of him and he could not leave him dead_ ) he could endure anything.  Almost welcomed something, anything, to distract him from the image of Ben’s eyes.

When had anything in his life ever _ever_ gone the way he hoped?

“You, Moose, are a menace.  I don’t want you here, but I hardly want you wandering around trying to find a way to destroy everything I’ve worked for.”

Sam blinked in confusion, still trapped in a feedback loop of grief and pain and loss and _Ben’s fucking eyes following him everywhere he looked_.  It was slightly reminiscent of when he’d been plagued by hallucinations of Lucifer (and hadn’t that been when they’d first met? Ben helping this stranger who was clearly not working with all thrusters?), except that this was by far worse because then he’d wanted them to go away.  But if this was all he had left of Ben he didn’t want it to fade.

He couldn’t focus around the violent emotions surging through him.  His surroundings only seemed to come to him in surges, images caught in a strobe light flashed against the images dancing through his own mind, intruding and receding in jerks and stops and starts.

Crowley studied the younger Winchester standing in the cell with a shackle around one leg and looking more dazed and confused than the demon could recall.  Not that he really figured it would last long.  If he’d learned one thing it was that any Winchester had the potential to be more trouble than they were worth and this one, for all that his brother was a killer, was more dangerous by far.

What he _wanted_ to do was simply destroy him and have done with it.  He was the King of Hell and Sam was his now.  Except that he wasn’t.  And he didn’t want Moose to know that he actually _couldn’t_ destroy him at the moment.  Because he wanted to be sure that if he did there would be no coming back.  And there shouldn’t be, but then the younger Winchester kept turning up like a bad penny when you least expected it and for now, Crowley felt better knowing where his prize was.

For his part, Sam pulled it together long enough to recognize where he was and what Crowley had said, pulled it together enough to focus on Crowley  and the look in those eyes was broken and shattered in ways it had never been before.  But he said nothing, only frowned, glanced around the cell then looked back to Crowley.

“Yes well, I expect you know how it goes.  A soul gets tortured, endlessly, until they end up becoming a demon.  But you can’t trust demons, and the last thing I need is a recalcitrant demon Moose on my hands.  So enjoy the quarters.  You’ll be here for a while.”

And Crowley was gone.

Leaving Sam alone with nothing but the swirl of knife-edged pain and misery and the hollow in his chest and the image of Ben’s eyes.

And that’s when Sam learned that he’d been so so wrong.

Left alone with absolutely nothing to distract him from the pain still eating him from the inside out like a slow acid burn and the knowledge that he’d _left Ben alone_ , and that last look replaying itself over and over and over again, Sam started to almost wish to be tortured.  Being carved into would be easier to bear.  Would give him something else to focus on instead of drowning slowly in the loss and aching hollowness and the lack of Ben’s presence.

Time began to lose meaning.  There was nothing to break the monotony.  Nothing for Sam to focus on or think about except Ben.  The love and loss and keen serrated edge of pain that cut again and again and again leaving gaping wounds that didn’t bleed and never dulled.

And because Sam believed he deserved every shred of pain ( _it was his fault he should never have loved Ben, never stayed with him, never believed he could do anything but bring him pain_ ) he just didn’t fight it.  There wasn’t a reason to fight it.

At least, not at first.

Eventually one can become accustomed to even the most excruciating pain if it doesn’t kill.  And Sam was already in Hell.  Enduring was something he could do.  What finally started to edge into the loop of pain and loss and loneliness was knowing he’d left Ben alone without even an explanation or a last good-bye or told him that he loved him.  What started to edge in was remembering that Ben had already lost someone he loved, a wife and a daughter, and it had almost broken him then.

Sam had never been jealous of that.  Had sometimes wished he could have brought them back for Ben.  But he’d seen the scars it had left behind.  Seen how deeply it had wounded Ben.  And it slowly began to occur to him that he’d just inflicted a new set of scars on the man he loved because he hadn’t been able to let him die.

Which was the thought that finally did Sam in.

Time might have lost all meaning to this point, but the sudden all-consuming need to apologize to Ben built and twined into the grief and pain that had already weakened any hold on sanity Sam still had.  And under normal circumstances and for anyone else it would have simply become another kind of torture to break them.

But Sam was who he was.

He’d spent his life fighting it.  From the moment he’d learned what Heaven and Hell had planned for him.  From the moment he’d learned he was Lucifer’s vessel.  Even the whole thing with Ruby, the demon blood, all of it, hadn’t been done solely for the sake of power.  It had started as an ends to a mean.

Dean had been the only other person he’d been willing to sell his soul for and that hadn’t worked because of the Heaven and Hell’s plan.  But even then Sam hadn’t really known just what it meant to be him.  It went beyond Azazel’s blood dripped into his mouth as an infant of six months.  Sharing a body with Lucifer and then a cage with him and his brother had shown him that much, though he’d done everything he could to shove that knowledge down and ignore it as much as possible.

It wasn’t the demon blood.  That had just been a crutch.

Whatever it was that made him Lucifer’s true vessel also attuned him to Hell in ways no other person past or present had been.  He’d felt it in the Cage.  But he’d had no desire to embrace it because he’d jumped to save the damn world.

He hadn’t thought he would ever find a reason, not even Dean, that would make him embrace that part of himself.

( _It would change him, make him something he didn’t want to be, damn him in ways he could never redeem and he knew it, fought it, thought he had won_ )

And then he met Ben.  Loved Ben.  Held him as he died.  Sold his soul for him.  _And left him alone_.

( _He’s my world, my heart, my soul and I hurt him, left him alone, didn’t tell him how much I loved him.  I couldn’t bear to live without him and instead made him live without me. What have I done?_ )

If he was a stronger man he’d stay where he was and leave Ben alone.  He’d done enough damage by crashing into his life, was the reason Ben had died in his arms.

( _He could still see the blood, hear the rattle of his breath, the weight of him. The last thing he said, the look in his eyes as he’d died, and the way the world had shattered around him in that moment. He couldn’t have let Ben stay dead any more than he could have stopped the moon from rising. He loved too much and not enough for that._ )

But he wasn’t.

He had to get back.

Had to explain.

Had to apologize.

Had to make it right.

Sam would do anything.  Anything at all for that purpose.  To replace the haunting image of Ben’s eyes that still hung in front of him, still stood between him and the world around him, never moving always there, with the reality he would do fucking anything at all.

Even what he swore he would _never_ do.

Which was the moment he stopped simply enduring.

The moment when he felt something in him fracture and split.

The moment when he turned and embraced everything he’d tried to deny since it had become known to him.

Because he had to get back.

Back to Ben.

Because nothing else mattered.

He would do what it took.  _Whatever_ it took.  Would use everything he was (would become) to that end.

_Nothing_ else mattered.

Only Ben.


End file.
